Luca’s face screws up in a scowl. ‘He is the Great Hunter. A fallen angel, some say. He is death, Anna. When he appears, it follows on after him like a cloud o’ crows follows the plough.’ His voice drops. ‘They says he and the Devil, they do compete for lost souls. He is to be fled from, always.’ He turns and looks at me.
‘Remember that. He ain’t some farmer on a cart. You is in the Old World now, and nothing is what it looks like.’ He reaches out a hand and touches my face; and we sit like that, just for one moment, while the sun rises out of its bloody bed in the east and the light climbs higher up the trees.
T
HERE IS TEA
for breakfast, and a kind of flat cake which the women bake in the ashes of the fire. Bannock, Jaelle calls it, and it sits heavy in the stomach. When they are done I help them haul up water from the little stream which runs down at the bottom of the wood, and they douse the campfire in a whoosh of sharp-smelling steam. Then we all go on our hands and knees and break up the warm wet embers in our fingers and scatter them, and the men rake dead leaves over the scar, and everyone packs up.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask Queenie as they all begin to troop out of the wood and onto the track again.
‘Does it matter?’ she asks me with a smile. ‘You don’t always got to be going somewhere, little one. The journey is what counts. Soon enough, we’ll be scattering again, and some of us will go one way, and some t’other. Best thing is to taste the time together and enjoy it. Come sowing, the family will be all over the country working here and there, and we’ll be bent-backed with the labour o’ the birthing year. Right now, the land sleeps, and we can walk across it as grand as kings. The crops is yet to be planted, and the beasts are all in the byre. Winter is hard, but in winter we is as free as we can be.’
‘What about the Roadmen? How do we stay clear of them?’
‘You might as well ask how we stay clear o’ the rain. They is part o’ the world just as we is. Sometime there is a storm, and sometime there is shelter to be had from it, and sometime not. We takes it as it comes.’
It is not much of an answer, even to me. But I see that I will not get anything else out of Queenie for now. As we move up the track she and Jaelle have their heads together, talking quietly, and I can’t quite pluck up the courage to eavesdrop.
W
E WALK EAST
along the old track, a close gaggle of ragged people with burdens roped to their backs. I scan the surrounding hills and downs as we go but the countryside seems empty, to me at least. Nothing moves in the bright chill of the morning but us and a few distant birds, and as the day grows the flight and pursuit of the night before seems almost like a dream, a moving picture left behind in the dark of a nickelodeon. Life is normal again, or as normal as this new life can be.
We come to a crossroads on the height of a tall down, and turn north along a real road. It leads off the ridge and plunges steeply downhill with a thick wood on our right and a village straddling the way ahead.
‘Blowingstone Hill,’ Luca says, striding along beside me with that tireless pace of his. ‘And that is King’s Stone village. Queenie – tell her about it – she loves the stories, this one.’
The older woman looks down at the country below. ‘There’s a great stone with a hole in it, and some can get it to sound a note, if they’ve the lungs of an ox. An old king blew through the stone to summon his soldiers for a great battle with the people o’ the north, long ago. They say those as can raise a sound from the stone is a future king of England.’
‘Have you tried?’ I ask Luca.
He grins. ‘I ain’t never going to be no king, Anna. That’s for sure.’
We are down from the ridge now, and the land has become ordinary, the little roads and woods and villages of the heart of England. We turn off to the north-west so the sun is behind my right shoulder, and tramp through Uffington. The company splits up here, some going ahead, some falling behind.
‘Shouldn’t we all stay together?’ I ask Luca.
‘There’s folk would not take too kindly to seeing two dozen of our kind walk past ’em in a bunch,’ he says. ‘One twitchy old maid calls in the peelers, and before you knows it they is packing us in a Black Maria and it’s away to a workhouse, or the cells. Best to come through these places a trickle at a time.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘That’s the way o’ the world, Anna. You wants to stay free and clear of ordinary folk, then you got to be careful about it.’
We walk on. The roads are quiet. I count half a dozen motor cars and a single horse and trap before midday. We walk through Fernham, Little Coxwell, and Great Coxwell, and it comes on to rain. A steady, chill up-and-down kind of rain that patters on the head and shoulders. I am glad of my galoshes now. I think of all the times I sat in the hall in Moribund Lane and watched the old Greeks come through the door shaking the wet off themselves, Pa pumping their hands and rattling away in Greek and English. And the fire burning in the front room. And I would give anything – anything – to have that back again.
It has not been such a long time I suppose, but I feel so very different from the little sulking girl who just wanted to be left alone. Even Pie is not the same. She is packed up in my knapsack now like any other kind of baggage. I miss her and I do not. I miss being able to talk to her as though she was a real person. I think that is over and done with now. But she is still all I have left of a far distant world, and I will never part from her.
I am glad of the rain. I hate people to see me cry.
T
HE LAND RISES
once again. I am rather grumpy now because the wet has soaked through my coat and I can feel it cold on my chest and it is dripping from my fingers. Pa’s old cap keeps the worst of it from my head, but his scarf is as sodden as if I had thrown it in a ditch and trodden on it. I think about sleeping out of doors in this, and my heart is down in my galoshes with my poor numb toes.
Luca appears beside me, bobbing up like a Halloween apple. For some reason he is smiling. ‘It gets like this, and I just starts to thinking about the fire at day’s end,’ he says, and nudges me playfully. ‘Don’t be fixin’ on the here and now. We’ll sit around it tonight and all be wet and miserable as sin together, and I’ll bet you anything you like you can laugh about it then.’
I have to smile back.
Then I look up at the slope rising ahead. It is a low hill crowned with trees. It looks somehow important, and I can’t say why.
‘Is that where we’re going?’
Luca wipes the rain out of his eyes. He sobers. ‘Seems so.’
‘Does it have a name? They all have names.’ I nudge him back. ‘I bet you know.’
We splash along. Luca does not seem to want to talk any more. In fact he has drawn away and pulled his cap down to shield his face from the weather.
We are all bent into it, lashed by it, the January day closed in around us like a wet fog. I wonder if I have said something wrong.
‘Badbury Clumps, they names that place round here.’ It is Jaelle. Her black hair is plastered like seaweed over her face and her skin is as white as Pie’s. She looks as though there is no blood in her at all, but she is peering up at the looming tree-topped height with an odd light in her eyes.
‘Our folk still uses the old name for it. We calls it Badon Hill.’
T
HERE IS A
shallow bank with a wood inside, tall beeches again with still a few coppery leaves clinging to them. The wood floor is flat and open. The trees make the patter of the rain even louder but it seems somehow quieter within, like being in a shed with the rain on the roof. I take off Pa’s hat and look up. We must have walked ten or twelve miles this morning, and already the day is drawing in. Once again, the normal world beyond pulls back, and there is only the dark sky and the rain and the wood, and the cold wet earth underfoot. Ageless things.
I shall get used to it I suppose. I hope I do. I hope it is not always this hard.
One by one, the rest of them trickle in. Queenie is not here, which is odd since I have never yet seen her more than ten feet from Jaelle’s side. There is little talk; they all seem to have been here before and know what to do.
I stand there dripping and watch them, for despite this morning I don’t feel as though I should just pitch in with the rest. I don’t know quite what to do. Not yet.
It is the women who do all the setting up. The men seem to drift away into the trees. I don’t know if they are hunting, or seeking firewood or water, or perhaps even guarding us. But the women need no help from them. And Jaelle is a wizard when it comes to getting the fire lit.
She clears a space down to the earth before laying a little carefully made bed of twigs. Then she produces a fistful of timber from the leather pouch under her coat. I half want her to start striking flint and steel, but it is a match which does the trick, and more of the women step forward with sticks and little branches that they produce from under their clothing as though they were hoarded treasure. They have been carrying them all day it seems, and I feel horribly guilty. I did not know. I wish someone had said, and I would have done the same.
The fire sputters in the heavy drops which are cascading down from the trees above. Jaelle bends over it, and blows on the guttering flames, and passes her hand over them as though she is stroking a cat. The light flashes, startling me. It blows out blue and green, and catches in the wood at last, rising bright and clear.
It is dark enough now for it to cast shadows. In the bright yellow light of it Jaelle meets my eyes and smiles, and shakes her hand as though it hurts her.
Old Job turns up and he has a billhook which he uses as quick and deft as a knife, and he slashes and hacks at some green wood and stabs it into the ground. A spit, all white wood and grey bark, in its own way a little sculpture.
Soon there is a can of water hanging over the fire, and I can just begin to see the sense of what Luca was saying earlier. I always thought that firelight in a wood was a fine thing, one of the best things. But here and now it is more than that. It is all that makes it possible to look into the prospect of the night ahead. Without it, the misery would be overwhelming.
I hear hacking and chopping in the wood out of the light. More of the men come in with bundles of firewood, and they dump them before walking away again. The women pile them up next to the flames, and some of the greener limbs begin to ooze bubbled sap with the heat, while from the more rotten wood the insects begin to crawl like rats leaving a sinking ship. Beetles and woodlice and all manner of crawling life, all scurrying away from the flames.
But I am so glad of it. I take off my coat the way most of the others are doing and hold it before the flames. Not to dry it – that would take too long – but simply to warm the wetness it holds.
There is very little talk. I hear them speak in their own language, and wonder if I shall ever have to learn it. Un, deux, trois… I hope not.
‘It’ll clear afore morning,’ a voice says beside me. It is Queenie.
She seems to have appeared out of nowhere. The rain has soaked her and covered her in bright-lit drops. She looks as though she is dressed in gems, and her face is shining with water. She appears much younger than she did trudging along through the day and unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t so much as shiver once. I can see Jaelle in her face, and Luca too. I wonder who their father is, and if he is out here with us somewhere in the gathering January dark.
‘You has many questions, little one. I sees ’em in your eyes,’ Queenie says, and sits down before the fire, waving a hand for me to follow.
She has a smell about her, thick and musty. It reminds me a little of the smell of the attic, but is more powerful than that. As I take my place beside her, so the others seem to fade away A long burning stick is lifted from our fire to light another, and I am sure the woman who takes it bows to Queenie as she backs away.
‘This is Badon Hill,’ Queenie says. ‘It is our place, as Whitehorse Hill belongs to the Roadmen. All this part of England is as deep in magic and myth as the mind of a child. The great battles of the long ago past was fought here, in the White Horse Vale, and before that, the stones was raised and the old signs was carved into the earth itself. Avebury, down to the south and west of here – it were the heart of worship once, and the sun was bowed to. But before even that, men knelt to the moon, for the moon is tied to the making of life, and the cycles of the Great Mother.’
Queenie looks at me, and for a second it seems almost as though the weight has fallen from her face, and she is as lean-boned as Luca.
‘You is part of that now, child. With the first running o’ your blood, you is become a woman. And the moon moves in you, even as it does in Luca there. Just in a different way, is all.
‘In the oldest of stories, the Great Mother was a mare, a she-horse. She gave birth to the stars theyselves. But men took the horse and used it in their wars, and made the stallion their symbol, forgetting the old truth of it. So the Roadmen, as they would become, carved the white horse on the very face o’ the hills to mark their power.
‘And the people that worshipped the moon, they faded into the shadows o’ the world. Men bowed to the sun for the seeming power of it, but even that was twisted into the worship of the Christ-man, who came later.’
Her face tightens, becomes angry.
‘And his followers conquered all with their lies, leaving the Old World in the darkness, ’til it was nothing more than myth and memory.
‘Beltane, they stole and made into the feast o’ their god’s death and rebirth, twisting the ancient truth. Samhain, they took to pray for their dead, and it became Hallow’s Eve. Imbolc and Lughnasa, they names for their saints. All this was taken from us by the followers o’ the Christ-man, until only a tithe of what was once known across the whole o’ the wide western isles is kept. By such as us. A people as is vanishing, year on year, until it comes down to a last few, wandering the downs and scratching for a way to get by.